Arkaea features Herrera on drums, former Fear Factory member Christian Olde Wolbers on guitar as well as Threat Signal members, Jon Howard on vocals and Pat Kavanagh on bass. Years in the Darkness emits a very strong Fear Factory-like sound. While the music has a familiar feel the vocals can be overly screechy at parts. However, the expectation of the album to be a Fear Factory clone fades after the first few songs as the music and vocals mold together to produce some relentless tracks. The band also released a video for their hard-hitting single, “Locust”.
Herrera conveys a strong aura of confidence with anything he articulates. He’s been crashing the music industry for twenty years and still has an extreme passion for playing metal. His drumming has always been praised for its intense speed and machine-gun sound. When asked what makes him unique from other drummers, he modestly replied, “Most [other] drummers just kinda keep the beat. I kinda am the rhythm on top of that. A lot of people can’t play it, but that being said, a lot of people can play it.”
While the heavy metal scene has changed over the past decade, Herrera has always continued down his own road. Fear Factory gave Herrera his first real taste of one of the most important traits needed for making it in the music business, originality. “One of the things that we kinda pioneered with Fear Factory was we added a lot of elements to metal that weren’t really metal before…We added keyboards…melodies, not just heavy singing, [and] we took out guitar solos. So from the beginning we were this band that kinda added all these different elements that don’t generally belong in that type of music.”
While Herrera has indulged his passion for his music, he has seen how the industry has changed. He is disappointed that the music has been taken over by immediate gratification driven record labels. “They used to build a brand. You build this band and it eventually blows up. [Then] you get a Guns N’ Roses. You get a Metallica…It [wasn’t] about how many records am I going to sell NOW, it [was about] how many records are we going to sell over the next 10 years.”
Herrera feels that newer bands are coerced into this way of thinking. The record companies set the trend of what bands need to do to make it in the industry. “I think it kinda started to show around the late 1990’s and early 2000’s when everyone was trying to get on the radio and everyone was trying to get a song on MTV. Everyone needed to have that hit single because the record label needed two or three hits songs they could take to radio. It was almost like this formation that was dealt on bands. You need at least two singles, you need a song [for] radio, you need a song you can do a video [for], this is kinda the cool sound now so you gotta have a song like this.”
Nevertheless, record labels haven’t snared Herrera away from pursuing his music career. While heavy metal is one of the toughest styles of music to market, Herrera has adapted to the changing times. He has taken advantage of social networking sites to promote his music. However, his initial, tentative, approach to using MySpace had some mixed results. “My web guy was like ‘Dude ya gotta get a MySpace site’. I was like okay, what the hell, but I’m only going to approve people I know…Well I had the site up for a few days and then I started getting friend requests. I’m like, I don’t know who you are, so I hit ignore…Well I started getting hate mail like two days later…So now I got like 11,000 or 12,000 friends and I only know like 800 of them.”
As time has gone on, Herrera has expanded his enterprises beyond music and began his own video game soundtrack production company, called 3volution Productions. He grew up a huge fan of Atari and SEGA and decided to get into the industry himself. His music has been featured in many games since the late 1990’s, including the Tom Clancy: Ghost Recon series.
He also spends a good deal of his time promoting his energy drink, named ‘Cocaine’. The controversial name has caused the drink to be banned in Illinois, Connecticut and Texas but its marketability remains strong as it is being sold in 17 other states and 27 countries outside the US. The drinks main appeal is that it contains 3.5 times the amount of caffeine as Red Bull, giving credence to the name ‘Cocaine’.
While Herrera has expanded his creativity from drumming to other ventures; he always goes back to the music, despite itself. He has been around long enough to see record labels attempt to ruin music for the real fans and experienced the bitter break up of his former band, Fear Factory. This, however, has not debased his ambition for making music and giving fans what they want. “I love to do music. I love to write. I love to record. It’s in my blood. This is what I do and I love to do it. You try to find the silver lining because you want to do this.”
Herrera will be touring with Arkaea towards the end of summer and despite the ban of his energy drink in Illinois, he will be optimistically coming thru Chicago, drums ablazin’. “We plan to be through there by the end of the year. Hopefully a couple times actually.”
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Thought-Provoking!
Written by Guest on 2009-08-04 16:17:16
Very informative article. Although I'm fairly new to heavy metal, I feel I've learned quite a bit about the many sides of Raymond Herrara, the record industry, and Arkaea. I would enjoy reading more of this type of in-depth interviews.  |
metal rules
Written by Guest on 2009-08-07 13:16:39
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